Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
The Kesbehs were a hardworking immigrant family with a successful business and deep roots in Houston. But after 9/11, the U.S. kicked them, along with thousands of other Arab and Muslim families, out of the country. Now, in a land the children barely know, they wonder why their life has been shattered.
Apr 26, 2004 | Sharif Kesbeh has just heard that America is deporting his eldest son to Jordan, and he's beaming. "The family will hopefully be reunited today, inshallah, after exactly one year," he says. Twenty-year-old Alaa had called his parents from the Detroit airport that morning to give them the news -- he was being freed from detention and would soon be put on a plane bound for Amman, the last of the Kesbehs to be expelled from the United States. "We prefer to live a miserable life anywhere rather than be detained," says Sharif as he and his family set off for Amman's Queen Alia International Airport to welcome Alaa home to a country where he's never lived before.
At 9:30 p.m., though, three hours after the plane lands, there's still no sign of the boy. Sharif, his wife, Asmaa, their five daughters and youngest son slump in their metal chairs, looking very small in the dim, gray expanse of the waiting room. Anticipation gives way to anxiety. Maybe, they worry, the Americans took Alaa back to jail. Or maybe he's being detained by the Jordanian security services, who might want to know why he's been thrown out of the country where he and his family made their home for 11 years.
When the rest of the Kesbehs arrived in Amman a year ago from their home in Houston, they were questioned for hours by police incredulous at their story. The Jordanians could scarcely believe that an entire family would be kicked out of the United States with nothing but what they could carry unless they had committed some great crime.
The Kesbeh's kids, with their Texas accents and elementary Arabic, were also bewildered, though they'd known what was coming. Except for the youngest, Afnan, an American citizen, they all have Jordanian passports like their parents, but they'd never lived in the country before, and until the very last moment, they were sure that some miracle would keep them at home in the United States. "The first day here, my kids could not believe it that they are not in America," says Sharif.
A year later at the same airport, waiting for their brother, the Kesbeh kids are still dreaming of elsewhere.
"Imagine that we're here because we're going back to Houston," says 19-year-old Sondos. With her long, loose hair, tight pink pants and black high heels, she stands in defiant contrast to the majority of Jordanian women in their hijabs, or Islamic head scarves.
"I wish," says 17-year-old Hadeel, her curly, blond-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail.
"We left everything sweet behind," says their mother, 40-year-old Asmaa, who, with her head scarf and embroidered robe, is the only woman in the family who blends in in Amman.
"Here," says 21-year-old Noor, "everything is bitter."
At the airport, a security guard presses his face to a nearby Plexiglas window, staring intently at these young women with their lip gloss and, except for Noor and Asmaa, uncovered heads. Hadeel stares angrily, unflinchingly back. "Have you noticed how guys here stare at you?" she asks, a hard twang in her voice. "And they'll say things, too. They'll hit a girl. It's a very corrupt society." When he finally looks away, she smirks. "I won," she says.
Speaking quietly, Noor, a lithe, doe-eyed woman who looks younger than 21 but acts older, says she's worried about her younger sisters' alienation from their new home. "The problem is they think they'll be coming back to Houston soon," she says. "They still haven't unpacked everything."
Right now, though, the Kesbehs have little chance of returning to Texas. They've joined the thousands of other Arab and Muslim immigrants deported from America since Sept. 11, in one of the largest mass expulsions in American history. In the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft launched a series of crackdowns aimed specifically at illegal immigrants from Muslim countries. Thousands were rounded up and detained, often for months, and around 20,000 were put into deportation proceedings. More are being added every day.
Many of them have children who are American citizens, forcing them into a brutal choice: Either uproot their kids, or leave them behind. "It's very common," says Sam Quiah, community organizer for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a nonprofit whose attorneys have represented many post-9/11 deportees. "Families are being torn apart."Once the government began treating immigration violations as a corollary of terrorism, there was little room to take individual circumstances into account. The Kesbehs, parents and children alike, were from the Middle East, and they were in the United States illegally. It didn't matter that they'd broken no other law, that Sharif always paid taxes on his business (much of which involved, of all things, selling American flags). It didn't matter that the kids knew no home but Houston.
They still feel like aliens in their new city, a sprawl of inelegant sand-colored buildings linked by streets that often lack sidewalks. Built on seven hills, Amman was once the Roman city of Philadelphia, and it still boasts an ancient amphitheater in the city center, but over the centuries it declined into a mere village. Only in the last few decades has it been built up again, constructed in the style of Los Angeles, without souqs and promenades where one can easily enter into the life of the place. On many streets there are more armed policemen than pedestrians. Everywhere -- suspended over roads, posted in the windows of dingy shawarma stands, greeting arrivals at the airport -- are photos of Jordan's pudgy-cheeked King Abdullah. It is illegal to criticize him, something that still strikes the American-educated Kesbeh kids as very strange.
Sharif, a lumbering 55-year-old man given to eloquent lamentations and dramatic hyperbole, speaks about his family's calamity as if it were unique in all the world, but there are others like them. A 45-minute drive from the Kesbeh's apartment in crowded East Amman live the Abu-Shabayeks, a Palestinian family of nine ejected from America, where they'd lived for a dozen years in North Carolina, near Raleigh. Five of their seven children are American citizens. The eldest two had to drop out of their Jordanian high schools because they barely speak Arabic, and the youngest five are struggling in every subject except English. Their new neighborhood is a barren place on the edge of the city's sprawl where herds of goats and long brown Bedouin tents are interspersed with low concrete housing blocks. They have no friends here.
Hanan Abu-Shabayek, 17, looks Jordanian with her hijab and long gray robe, but she speaks with a honeyed Southern accent. "We just feel that the world..."
"Is falling apart," her Bronx-born 13-year-old sister, Haneen, finishes her sentence.
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